Ken Wakui’s Tokyo Revengers began in Weekly Shonen Magazine on 1 March 2017 and finished on 16 November 2022 at chapter 279, collected in 31 volumes. Takemichi Hanagaki, twenty-six and going nowhere, sees a news report that the girlfriend he had in middle school has been killed in a gang conflict. The next day he is pushed off a station platform and lands twelve years in the past.
What he does with the past is not get better at fighting. He changes what he says, to whom, at the moment it still counts. That is why most of the fights here are fights he loses, and why the recurring image is a boy refusing to stay down rather than winning. Each character carries a future of his own, from Manjiro Sano who founded the gang to his vice-captain Ken Ryuguji, so saving one person keeps knocking something else out of place.
Time-loop stories were common by the time this one arrived, and its readership had less to do with the loop than with how carefully it separates one kind of regret from another. The ending is in place at 31 volumes, and adaptations followed in animation and live action.
